Fire Your Doctor!: How to Be Independently Healthy

Summary

The focus of this book is how we can get better using practical, effective and safe natural therapies. The effective use of nutritional supplements and natural diet saves money, pain and lives. This title provides information on: Nutritional therapy for more than 80 health conditions; How to improve one's health through changes to diet and lifestyle; Practical tips on juicing and growing a vegetable garden; The latest scientifically validated supplement recommendations.

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Fire Your Doctor! - Andrew W Saul

Fire Your Doctor!

How to Be Independently Healthy

Andrew Saul, Ph.D.

Foreword by Abram Hoffer, M.D.

The information contained in this book is based upon the research and personal and professional experiences of the author. It is not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician or other healthcare provider. Any attempt to diagnose and treat an illness should be done under the direction of a healthcare professional.

The publisher does not advocate the use of any particular healthcare protocol but believes the information in this book should be available to the public. The publisher and author are not responsible for any adverse effects or consequences resulting from the use of the suggestions, preparations, or procedures discussed in this book. Should the reader have any questions concerning the appropriateness of any procedures or preparation mentioned, the author and the publisher strongly suggest consulting a professional healthcare advisor.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the copyright owner.

Foreword

Why do we need a book educating patients on how to stay healthy? Is it not the responsibility of the medical profession and other allied health professions to look after all our needs? Are we not all supposed to be medically pious, meaning that we look upon medical advice as the word from all high, as writ in stone? To answer these questions we need only to read the headlines in the daily press, where constant and recurrent cries are heard about the costs of treating the sick, the number of sick, the death rates, the increase in cancer, the resurgence of tuberculosis, the great calamity of HIV/AIDS, the number of Alzheimer’s patients. If the healthcare professions were able to maintain our health, then why are we in such poor shape?

The main problem is that often the best information gathered so painfully by the professions remains hidden within the obscure journals that were rash enough to publish them, and most people have not heard of, nor know how to use, the findings. This is still the hangover from the centuries-old tradition of guilds who maintained their secrets at all costs.

Modern medicine has failed, not in discovery, but in effectively bringing the attention of the people to the discoveries that have been made. The one field that has not failed in its educational effort is the drug industry, which has an enormously successful history of informing the public about the advantages of the drugs that they sell. The other discoveries, those dealing with nutrition, with herbs, with innovative treatment, remain buried in the tons of literature published every year. We need books such as this one by Andrew Saul to fill in the gap, to bring to the public what they need to know to get well and stay well, and to learn this in spite of lack of medical interest.

Even worse are the attempts of the medical profession to suppress valuable information if it does not conform to the conventional viewpoint. It takes at least forty years for major paradigm shifts in medicine, and while the battle of the paradigms rages, patients are deprived of the information that may save their lives. Excessive conservatism is very costly. When my colleagues and I first published our paper on the use of vitamin B3 for treating schizophrenia in 1957 (Hoffer, A., H. Osmond, M. J. Callbeck, and I. Kahan. Treatment of Schizophrenia with Nicotinic Acid and Nicotinamide.Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology 18 (1957):131–158), it was mostly ignored because the popular paradigm did not consider schizophrenia to be a biochemically based disease. Rather, it was a way of life and therefore could not have any connection with the use of simple vitamins in above-average doses. But as we continued to publish our findings, based upon double-blind studies, orthodox medical resistance actually began to mount. By the 1970s, the bias of the American Psychiatric Association had denounced orthomolecular (nutritional) psychiatry. Their position has been used as a shield to protect psychiatry from the vitamin heretics like myself, who found that patients truly recovered with nutritional treatment.

Orthomolecular medicine involves active participation between people and the professions, for it involves dietary and lifestyle changes, which cannot be done by the doctor alone. There is a keen need to educate the public, and motivate people to read and learn for themselves. Fire Your Doctor! is precisely about this (and certainly not about performing one’s own thoracic surgery, as a hostile critic might choose to mistakenly presuppose). The great orthomolecular educators, like Linus Pauling, have long aimed their work directly at the general reader. They did so because life-saving knowledge is too important to be passed over, and the academics, physicians, and physician associations were not listening. In this tradition, Fire Your Doctor! takes it straight to the people.

In 1945, we were taught to write prescriptions in Latin. Over the past sixty years, things have changed enormously. Now patients have access to whole libraries of material via the Internet. There are so many different information sources that many people get confused. We are flooded with new books for every known disease. Treatments are described in detail and for every known condition. The whole diversity of modern medicine, including the alternatives, is so diverse that it is impossible for lay people to properly assess the value of the treatment described.

The information world has changed from one with hardly any useful information written for the public to one where there is too much, and it is accumulating ever more quickly. We are compelled to turn to people who are knowledgeable and trustworthy, and who are more interested in healing the sick than they are in prestige or money. Such people sift the amazing amount of information, blow away the chaff, and harvest the kernels of truth.

Health-promoting information must include the correcting of misinformation that is so prevalent in the current medical literature. A professor of medicine once started his lectures by advising his students that only half the information he would give them was correct and he was not sure which half it was. I once opened a lecture at Columbia University by telling the students that most of the stuff they were being taught in psychiatry was wrong. The third-year medical students got up and gave me a standing ovation.

Misinformation is used to support, or to attack, a popular belief system. When it came to nutrition, the dietary evils of sugar and chemical food additives were supported by misinformation to counter the facts. When vitamins were found to be very helpful, the establishment quickly mobilized and released tons of misinformation about nonexistent evils of vitamins. Vitamin C was alleged to cause kidney stones; it does not happen. Niacin was supposed to cause liver damage; it does not. The construction of dangerous toxicity is limited only by the imaginations of the doctors. Factoids are created with wild abandon. The truth is that vitamins do not cause kidney damage, do not cause pernicious anemia, do not decrease fertility, do not cause liver damage, do not cause iron overload, do not interfere with glucose blood tests, do not decrease the effectiveness of chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Authors of health books should also be healers, should know what to emphasize, should know what are the values and defects of any therapeutic program, and above all, should write for the public. Good health books are now indispensable to help readers efficiently sort through the enormous amount of material so that it becomes meaningful for them. Each person must develop the diet that works best for him or her. But in order for them to do so, they have to understand the treatment options that are available. Fire Your Doctor! helps the reader do precisely this.

So, from an era fifty years ago, when no information was provided, we come to the present, where so much conflicting information is available that we depend on books such as this one to glean from the vast literature some of the main tenets of modern nutritional treatment. New information raises new questions, and this in turn creates new ways of dealing with the problems. Experience has taught us that we cannot depend upon the professions to make alternative health information available. Much of it is still controversial, but that is the nature of medicine. Fire Your Doctor! is about the medicine of nature, orthomolecular medicine.

—Abram Hoffer, M.D.

Preface

Another health book? Why?

Either the good ones are not being read, or the ones being read aren’t that good. Look around you at your family and friends: The need is there; a lot of people are just not healthy.

Can a book offer anything that well over one trillion (that’s a million million!) dollars per year spent on American health care hasn’t? Quite possibly. I can tell you that what is in this book has worked for me, for my family, and for people I have known over of the past thirty years. It may help you, too.

The biggest deception ever perpetrated upon the American people is the myth that improving your health with vitamins and natural living is somehow difficult or dangerous. Better health is not difficult; it is only perceived as difficult. And dangerous? It is conventional drug treatments for disease that are dangerous. But in newspapers, magazines, and on television, the public has been warned off the very vitamins and other supplements that have been repeatedly proven to reduce illness in practically every instance. The effective use of food supplements and natural diet saves money, pain, and lives … and you have been told not to do it.

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This especially includes your health care.

One of the most common questions about vitamin therapy is, Are huge doses safe? This book will help answer that question once and for all. And while we’re at it, here’s the answer in advance: Yes, megadoses of vitamins are very safe. Vitamins do not cause even one death per year. Pharmaceutical drugs, taken as directed, cause over 100,000 deaths annually.

Still, it is granted that we need access to all the tools that medicine and technology can provide, when used with caution. We must also fully use our natural resources of therapeutic nutrition and vitamins. To limit ourselves to pharmaceutical medicine is like going into the ring to fight the champ with one hand tied behind our backs.

For these reasons, there is a need for at least one more health book. And here it is. Brace yourself.

VITAMIN THERAPY WORKS

She sat in the corner, silently. The fifty-five-year-old woman’s face was in shadow, invariably turned down and toward the wall. And that’s where she stayed, day after day. She had no appetite and she never spoke to anyone. Her family had tried seemingly everything. Yes, she was under the care of a psychiatrist and, yes, she was on medication.

Actually, she’s been on a whole lot of different medications, her daughter told me. None of them has helped her and several made her worse. She tried to kill herself several times. Now she seldom moves from her corner, and she never says a word. Is there anything you can do?

At times like this, what you want is a wand to wave, but life so rarely resembles a Harry Potter story. This was all too real. Maybe the patient was past caring, but her family sure did. As I talked to one of her sons, the living room started to fill with relatives. I don’t know where they all came from; this working-class neighborhood house must have had a really big kitchen. Presently, all the relatives had created a semicircle around me waiting to hear something profound, something encouraging.

I felt uneasy (and who wouldn’t?) face to face with the entire family in an unresponsive, if not downright despairing, situation. But I had been asked to offer an opinion, and the time had come. I suggested the best orthomolecular (nutritional) therapy I knew of: megadoses of niacin, in multigram doses. Then, I mentally braced myself for their reaction.

There was no reaction. But they didn’t run off, either.

So I continued. Because she is so sick, your mother might need an exceptionally large amount of some vitamins, especially C and B complex. But her foremost need is for niacin, really large quantities of niacin.

How large? asked a male relative on my left. That question you can count on.

Thousands of milligrams a day, in divided doses, I answered. Possibly even 10,000 milligrams or more, every day.

They all listened. I got the distinct impression that they were weighing the gravity of what must certainly have felt like a hopeless situation against what must have sounded like a pretty simplistic solution. But still they did not run off. Some of the family now sat down, on chairs, the old sofa, and on the well-worn gray carpet.

The inquisition shall now begin in earnest, I thought.

Not at all. I was asked a series of intelligent, commonsense questions about the safety and administration of high doses of niacin. I explained niacin’s low toxicity and the need for large and divided doses. I told them to expect, at least initially, some pretty strong but harmless niacin flush side effects. And, I presented the need to educate their attending doctors as to what the family was doing. Finally, I outlined a therapeutic trial starting with 1,000 milligrams per day of niacin, and gradually but steadily increasing the dose by an additional 1,000 milligrams every day.

How will we know when to stop increasing the dose? asked a son-in-law.

When she responds, answered his wife. Right?

Yes, I said. The goal is to give enough niacin to see good results. You all will be the judges of that.

Will she have to keep taking niacin forever? asked another daughter.

Yes, but not necessarily as much as she’ll need initially. We first need to see if she responds at all. But if it works, why stop it?

Everyone nodded. Nobody smiled. Tough crowd. I left with a distinct feeling that I had contributed precious little to that family’s hopes.

Was I ever wrong. I got a call about two weeks later from a profoundly relieved, and positively delighted, daughter.

Mom is just fine, she said happily. She sits at the dinner table now. She talks to us, talks like nothing happened. It’s incredible. She’s off all medications. It’s the niacin: it made all the difference in the world.

That is wonderful news, I said. How much niacin is your mother taking now?

11,000 to 12,000 milligrams every day.

Do you happen to remember at what level she experienced a niacin flush? I asked.

That’s easy to answer, replied the daughter. She never flushed at all.

Wow—11 or 12 grams of niacin a day and no flush. This meant she had been severely deficient. But results are what matters in any therapeutic trial. A huge amount of niacin, along with the other B vitamins and vitamin C, had done the job. A very big job.

This is great! said the daughter. We have our Mom back!

That was a beautiful moment.

Later that month, the family took the fully mobile and positively talkative mother to see her psychiatrist. She didn’t need to go, but they all wanted the doctor to see the recovery with his own eyes. I was not there, but I heard about it afterward.

The doctor told all of us that there could be some side effects with that much niacin, said the daughter. Especially changes in liver function. Also, he said that Mom’s skin looked slightly darker to him. The doctor said she should not take niacin because of it.¹

None? At all? I said.

Right: none. He told her, and the rest of the family, that she should be on medication, not on some vitamin.

It is usually the medication that has harmful side effects, not the niacin, I said. "Dr. Abram Hoffer and other physicians with extensive experience administering niacin have found that niacin is not liver toxic. They report that niacin therapy can increase liver function tests, but they also point out that this elevation means that the liver is active. It does not indicate an underlying liver pathology.² If your doctor wanted to do monitoring tests, that is one thing. But to take a successful, already working therapy away from a seriously ill patient is quite another."

It really mystified me then, and it still does today: Just why are so many physicians prejudiced against vitamin therapy? Decades ago, Frederick Klenner, M.D., was so frustrated by his colleagues’ flat rejection of megavitamin therapy that he wrote that some doctors would rather see their patients die than use vitamins.

I asked her what the family had decided to do now.

We’ve already done what the psychiatrist said, and Mom no longer gets niacin. She is back on drugs, three of them.

The daughter then paused. I knew the worst was yet to come.

And, said the daughter, with a choke in her voice, Now my mom is back in the corner.

Indeed, this was no Harry Potter story. It was, I am sorry to say, much more like the medical tyranny illustrated in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. When doctors prefer patients to people, we have a problem.

We also have a solution: just say no. Fire your doctor. And take your vitamins.

Part One

Tools for Healthy Living

A Pep Talk to Get Started

Fire your doctor? Just what kind of a nut would say that?

A health nut, that’s who. Here’s my question to you: If you are not a health nut, just what kind of a nut would you rather be? Still, merely saying, Nuts! to your physician is not enough. There must also be a set of positive, proactive, and practical alternatives ready for you to use. Fire Your Doctor! provides a pack of them.

Health is a big subject and so is natural healing. There seem to be more areas of study, more -ologies and -opathies, than you can possibly shake a stethoscope at. It takes some distillation to concentrate it down to good stuff, but that is likely why you picked up this book.

You do not need to know every aspect of mechanics to be able to drive your car. You do not need to master every detail of electronics to use your computer. And, by golly, you do not need to have an exhaustive knowledge of physiology or pharmacology to use your body. Rather, you need to know what works best to get you well and keep you well. That is the focus of this book: how we can get better using practical, effective, and safe natural therapies. Starting today; right now, in fact.

Fire Your Doctor! is also about an attitude. It is about empowering yourself. First off, you have got to want it. Are you sick of sickness? Then, say the Chinese, you are no longer sick.

Secondly, Fire Your Doctor! is about knowledge. You need to know what to do and how to do it. This we gain through reading others’ work and by our experience confirming their experiences. It just so happens that these others are physicians. I am not a physician and I am certainly not smart enough to make up this stuff. I am, however, able to find out which researchers and physicians are getting successful results and share their knowledge with you.

Mostly, Fire Your Doctor! is about asserting yourself. For nearly thirty years, I have worked with lots of folks who have made the transformation from being somebody else’s fear-filled patient to being their own self-reliant, naturally healthy Self. It can be done, and you can do it.

WHY PEOPLE NEEDLESSLY SUFFER

Reason One: Fear

As a scrawny teen, high-school wrestling scared me green. I was quite terrified. Awaiting my turn to get creamed on the wrestling mat, I knew I’d had it. Our gym teacher, a paragon of gladiatorial efficiency, always paired us off by height. The problem was that I was tall but very skinny. My equally tall adversary invariably turned out to be a varsity football lineman, easily three times my weight. That’s why I knew my number was up.

Faced with the certainty of imminent pain, I had to gain the essentials not of wrestling, but of survival, and very quickly. I therefore developed the world’s fastest sit-out, followed by my immediately turning over and lying spread-eagled on the mat. Yes, I made a big human X, face down into the canvas. It worked, and I am here to tell the tale. I never won a match, but no one could pin me either.

Fear had very nearly crippled me, but my circumstances forced the learning curve far beyond what I thought I was capable of. Maybe you find yourself in an analogous position. If you are afraid of illness (and who isn’t?), you know what I mean: you may be ready to take matters into your own hands. With this book, you will have a stack of therapeutic alternatives and preventive strategies to protect your health. And all are drug-free.

Okay, never getting pinned in wrestling is one thing; raising healthy kids is quite another. I raised my kids to college age and they never had a single dose of any antibiotic. This book is about how you can learn to use natural therapies as we did.

While talking with General George Blood and Guts Patton, a soldier confessed that he was afraid of battle. Patton replied, So am I, son. The soldier, truly surprised, said, You, General? You’re not afraid of anything!

Patton answered, Anyone who tells you that they are not afraid of battle is either a liar or a fool. General Patton’s advice to this soldier, and to the rest of us, still rings true today: Never take counsel of your fears. Note that he did not say, Don’t have them. He said, Don’t listen to them.

We are all afraid of something. Just try to tell a four-year-old not to be afraid of a hypodermic needle. Or try to tell a teenage boy not to be afraid of calling up a girl and asking her for a date. Just try to tell a student pilot not to be afraid of flying an airplane solo for the first time. Or tell someone not to be afraid of major surgery. Just telling someone not to be afraid doesn’t work. The way to eliminate fear is to expose it for the fraud it is. Truth banishes fear. As there is no fear greater than the fear of getting a disease, we need the knowledge and tools to set ourselves free by taking control of our own health.

Years ago, while waiting for a train at London’s Euston Station, I was unavoidably involved in a conversation with a drunken derelict in search of a handout. As he coughed in my face, he told me he had recently gotten out of prison. He sought to prove his honesty by producing tattered but nonetheless recognizably official discharge papers. I happened to note, as he continued coughing, that he also had been diagnosed with tuberculosis (TB). I gave him a 50P coin to send him on his way so that I could breathe clean air again.

For a long time afterward, I worried about getting tuberculosis. I mean, what an exposure! Then, to compound my anxiety, when I first started out as a college instructor, the only teaching job I could get was in state prisons. My captive audience also coughed a great deal. One in eight prisoners tested positive for TB. I spent many hours in mostly unventilated rooms with a lot of very unhealthy men and women. As a condition of employment, prison faculty had TB tests, and fortunately mine remained negative.

The conclusion I drew from this? The body’s immune system is more important than is pathogen exposure. Or, as the great bacteriologist Louis Pasteur put it, The germ is nothing; the terrain is everything. Our terrain is our body—the territory that you have responsibility for and authority over. We live in a world full of germs. What you can do is strengthen your body’s defense systems to combat them

Reason Two: Erroneous Belief Systems

But sometimes we remain timid. Most people’s fear of self-care centers on three common fallacies:

1. You are not educated enough to treat yourself. That’s what doctors are for.

2. Natural therapies aren’t powerful enough to cure real diseases.

3. Megavitamin therapy is dangerous.

These are not facts; these are beliefs. And, as this book will demonstrate, they are all unfounded. Jazz musician Eubie Blake said it best: It’s not what we don’t know that harms us, but what we do know that ain’t so.

If your doctor does not believe in using vitamins, not only is that doctor behind the times, that doctor is not being scientific. Therapeutic nutrition is not a matter of belief; it is a matter of confirmed clinical experience.

Belief systems can be wrong. It is not a matter of belief that vitamin C powder applied directly to herpes sores heals them overnight. It is not a matter of belief that high doses of oral vitamin C is the best systemic antiviral on Earth. Nor is it a matter of belief that vitamin E stops heart disease.

Try these and see for yourself. Seeing is better than believing anyway.

Reason Three: Never Tried It

One of my favorite sayings is, If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. If you know something does not work, why belabor the issue? Try something else. Do not let fears or belief systems keep you from the most powerful, commonsense conclusion: There may be something you do not know about that may help you. There is no guarantee that the new is better than the old, but if you decline to investigate the new, there is an absolute guarantee that all you’ll have to choose from is the old. Explore your options and look for yourself.

WATCH ONE, DO ONE, TEACH ONE

Watch one, do one, teach one—that’s how we learn, a surgical resident told me over three decades ago, when I first gowned up as a student observer in the operating room. Watch a procedure, then do it, and then teach it. Here, he added, Hold that clamp like this. Yes, that’s it. He had no business letting me assist with surgery, but I began to learn how to learn: watch and copy.

Interestingly enough, that’s also how I learned to fly an airplane. Pay attention, my 275-pound, red-faced flight instructor said. If you get it right on the first attempt, the flight examiner won’t ask you for more. As much as I dreaded the flight test, I actually paid attention for a much stronger reason: I considered my overweight and hypertensive instructor to be a prime candidate for a mile-high heart attack. If he was going to die in the air, I was not about to let him take me with him. I wanted to be able to control and land that plane in the worst way. I wanted to live.

Motivation is a wonderful thing. Survival is probably the most powerful motivator: the breath of life is everyone’s number-one concern. No one wants to sicken and die, and sick people very much want to get well. That is why the most common Internet searches are for information on health and disease.

The title of this book is meant to confirm the notion that you can learn to manage your own health care. But how, when physicians are generally unwilling to teach us? There is only one path left to us: we’ll teach ourselves. Face it—most doctors do not explain their trade secrets any more than medieval guild members would show peasants how to make their own swords, purify their own silver, or read Latin. If you made your own sword, why have craftsmen? If serfs had access to their own silver, they would buy their freedom. If everyone could read, well, history would change.

Changing your present, and thereby your future, sounds even better, doesn’t it? When I am asked my goal in all of this, I answer, Each their own physician, today. I think one way to do this is to demystify medicine of its needlessly confusing terminology. Another way is to simultaneously present both the validity and the simplicity of natural health care.

EASY VERSUS SIMPLE

Asking me what to do, or seeking a physician to do it for you, is easy. Neither will work. If you want to be a pilot, you have to hoist yourself into the left seat of an aircraft and take the time to learn to fly. If you are content to be a passenger in the medical system, you are reading the wrong book. If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, and this especially includes your health care. You can learn it, you can do it, and you can share the way with others.

Change your lifestyle and you can dramatically improve your health. That’s so simplistic! rails our inner critic. We doubt natural therapy because it seems too simple to work and we doubt self-care because we doubt ourselves. We’ve been educated to be good consumers, and that includes becoming consumers of healthcare services. We have not been educated to be self-reliant.

The good news is that therapeutic nutrition is cheap, simple, effective, and safe. Of course, we have been taught that anything cheap, simple, and safe cannot possibly be effective against real diseases. And when, by our own verified experiences, we find that megavitamin therapy is cheap and effective, there are plenty of pharmaphilic (drug-loving) fear-mongerers trying to tell us that it can’t be safe. But vitamin therapy is